What was life like for the "average" person living in Nazi Germany
What was life like for the "average" person living in Nazi Germany
We’re seeing in the US that majority of the people are being apathetic or ignorant to what is going on as it doesn’t directly affect them, and others are pointing out that we’re on the same route as Germany. Once Hitler seized power and then later when the county split, what was life like for those people that didn’t say or do anything? Assuming they weren’t in a targeted class, did they just go on and live their lives normally? I know there was a drop in the quality of living for them, but did they not know any better? Was it a state of constant fear, or was there “no war in Ba Sing Se”
I’m just curious what majority of the population here would potentially experience.
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Well, the average people from then, they don't live anymore in this world.
My mom, and my mom in law are still here. Both were very little children then, born in 41 and 43. For them, the only memories are the end of the war, and then the time after.
So, what I heard from other people before:
It was always fear. The Nazi's methods were violent, unfair, inhuman and their power came from creating fear.
Of course the "average" people were not all affected equally. My folks all lived in very rural areas, and there things worked different. Fear was transported indirectly, by some "stronger" Nazis who controlled "medium" Nazis, who were then set to oversee "normal" people in some part of the country.
people that didn’t say or do anything?
Not existent after some point.
Everybody was required to actively support Hitler, for example with the infamous greeting. When you were greeted with "Heil Hitler", then, in the beginning, you had a chance to respond something like "yea, it's ok..." or "you can lick mine, too" (and of course, normal people said things like "Have a nice day"), but later, if you did respond with anything else than the same "Heil Hitler", and loudly and clearly, you could get shot right there on the spot.
Of course there were still some exceptions, but therefore you had to know very good who that other person was, and what was possible to do then.
In these rural areas, what many people did was simply hiding when the "wrong" people were in town.
This is absolutely inaccurate and borderline revisionism. Germans were not held at gunpoint to heil Hitler or risk being shot, the average german was perfectly happy and enjoyed the comforts naziism brought them. This inaccurate portrayal does nothing but abstract naziism to be an entity that only exists under specific horrifying conditions and not the reality that for the vast majority of Germans they were happy to be nazis.
Please go read about nazi germany before you make up some fanfic about how it was just like the wolfenstein games. "They Thought They were free" is a book entirely centered around the experiences of the average German during the nazi regime and not one word of your description is in his book.
From Milton Mayer:
These ten men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers. Nobody ever gave them a free sample of anything on the ground that what they thought of it would increase the sales of the product. Their importance lay in the fact that God—as Lincoln said of the common people—had made so many of them. In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus. They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.
Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, “the democratic part.” The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.
Please go read about nazi germany before you make up some fanfic
Now there's only one of us telling bull & fiction. I don't know your games and I stay with what my relatives and some neighbors have told me.
Ok, not many were shot in such a way, or in worse ways, but when it happened, then it got told, and people knew who the victim was, and most times people knew who the shooter was. And they remembered long after. Even I was told some of the names, but I didn't know the people, because it was so long before me.
Im saying your family stories are probably not as accurate as historians and authors who spoke to Germans in Germany in the 1950s about being nazis. Im very sure you're not lying about that being what they told you.
I'm calling you fantastical and wrong because painting a picture of nazi germany as a nation captive to a despot without any agency is holocaust revisionism. To say the German people were prisoners to the nazi regime is objectively false and all the documentation and research around the subject shows as much. They were very pleased with the reich and only started to sour once the war came home and started to get in the way of Germany's greatness. Please read the book I recommended. Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove this point wrong.
Thanks for sharing.
I'm guessing it felt a lot like the video games and books describe living in a fascist regime
Soldiers are everywhere, and you do your best to not stand out for any reason.
You are always worried about someone turning you in on false accusations.
You have to hide your joy, and save it for only the deepest parts of your home.
Soldiers are everywhere,
No soldiers everywhere. Only some men from "the party" = the Nazis. These were more or less "normal" people before, but they were given power, and they let power corrupt them.
The soldiers (=the sons of the families, no volunteers!) were all far away, at war, and everybody was hoping that the would come back home alive.
and you do your best to not stand out for any reason.
Yes.
Ah, good insight about the Nazi party men with power, not soldiers everywhere. Thanks.